By this last deposition he declares what he believes he should have done, had he been obliged to dispute his birth-right, which he had not formally renounced till after his journey to Vienna and Naples. Here then we have a second deposition, not of any thing he had already done, and the actual commission of which, would have subjected him to the rigorous inquiry of the law, but of what he imagines he should have done had occasion offered, and which consequently is no subject of a juridical inquiry. Thus does he twice together accuse himself of private thoughts that he might have entertained in a future time. The known world does not produce an instance of a man tried and condemned for vague and inconsequential notions that came into his head, and which he never communicated to any one; nor is there a court of justice in Europe that will hear a man accuse himself of criminal thoughts; nay, we believe that they are not punished by God himself, unless accompanied by a fixed resolution to put them in practice. To these natural reflections it may be answered, that the czarowitz had given his father a just right to punish him, by having withheld the names of several of the accomplices of his flight. His pardon was promised him only on condition of making a full and open confession, which he did not till it was too late. Lastly, after so public an affair, it was not in human nature that Alexis should ever forgive a brother in favour of whom he had been disinherited; therefore, it was thought better to punish one guilty person, than to expose a whole nation to danger, and herein the rigour of justice and reasons of state acted in concert.